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Monday, 28 August 2017

I’ve been taking an August break from the blog as I embark
on some travels. Wherever I went, however, I discovered rather wonderful
examples of the ‘positive framing’ technique that I discussed in my final
pre-holiday post.

What I was saying was that, even if you have some rather
negative things to say, you can still make a positive impact buy applying
positive language. The first example came up on the train to Edinburgh for my
visit to the Festival. How irritating do you find those signs listing all the different
(sometimes unmentionable) things you are not allowed to throw down the
loo?So well done Virgin Trains for not
irritating me and actually making me want to get involved in keeping their
plumbing clear.

Security was tight in Las Vegas and David Copperfield had
the additional concern of not wanting us to film his illusions. He achieved
this by engaging us directly – asking us to take out our phones and send him an
email. This created some interesting interactivity on the big screen and he
then sent us an email predicting everything that was to about to happen in the
show. We had to promise, though, not to look at it yet (that would spoil the
show for us). Indeed he asked us, while our phones were in our hands, to now
put them into a rather beautiful box on the table immediately in front of us. What
is usually a nagging chore that washes over you had become a pleasure!

Finally, I am indebted to behavioural economics guru Paul Craven for a most charming example of asking people not to use their phones –
it’s what Paul calls a ‘nudge’.

Tuesday, 25 July 2017

Business presentations are not all about trumpeting good
news, advantages and benefits; in most cases they need to cover off less
positive points – failures even. With ‘positive framing’, however, the overall
upbeat mood can often be sustained and maybe even enhanced.

I was reminded of this recently while coaching post-graduate
students and graduate trainees, all of whom showed admirable respect for doing
as they had been told. The graduate trainees had been instructed to conclude
with ‘Achievements’ and ‘Lessons Learned’, so we saw presentations with
generally well-trumpeted ‘Achievements’, followed by phrases such:
“Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to …...” – which formed the conclusion
to their presentation.

My feedback focused on two key points:

1)You
simply must end on some positives, so see if you can slip ‘Lessons Learned’ in before ‘Achievements’. If you really
can’t, then add a short, sharp and positive over-arching ‘Call to Action’ at
the very end.

2)Leave
out negative words such as ‘unfortunately’ and reframe your ‘Lessons Learned’
along the following lines: ‘What I will do in future is make extra time to do X
so that I can achieve a more thorough understanding of Y and Z.”

Many of the post-grads, meanwhile, were acutely aware that
they had not been able to fulfil all the requirements of the pitch they were
giving to join an incubator programme. Their instinct was to keep quiet about
those elements and hope no one noticed or enquired.

My feedback here tended to be:

1)Leave
the ‘missing/lacking’ items in your agenda so it is clear that you are not
hiding from them.

2)When
you get to the part about plans going forward come back to those
‘missing/lacking’ items and stress that these would be among your first
priorities when you join the programme. Ideally, explain how much more
effectively you will be able to address those issues at this later stage.

I am conscious that there is scope here to get into the
realms of ‘spin’, if not actual ‘BS’. But I firmly believe that these examples qualify
neither as spin, nor BS. They actually fall within the more general practice of
using strong language and positives when communicating. Specifically, these
examples also demonstrate that the presenter has learned the lessons/understood
what was needed, together with how they are going to apply and prioritise those
learnings in the future.

Tuesday, 11 July 2017

There is a tendency among most presenters when using visual
aids – in particular PowerPoint – to display a slide and then start talking
about it. The result is that their presentation is then being driven by their
slides – the visual support has ended up in the spotlight! Presenters need to
remember that they are the show –
anything else is simply to help them to deliver their presentation and the
audience to understand it.

Hence the advice from Presentation Skills coaches such as
myself: “Say it, then show.” The
perils of doing the opposite – showing,
then saying - become all the more acute when a presenter displays a list of
bullet points, or a selection of visual images, all at once. This means that
the presenter loses any control of where the audience’s attention is directed,
as they will inevitably start reading ahead.Most, but not all, slides therefore need to be displayed in a series of
‘builds’ so that the audience is looking at the point that the presenter is currently
talking about.

Part of the reason for presenters taking a back-to-front
approach to say it, then show is that
they are often uncertain as to what comes next and use the appearance of a
slide as their own prompt. To make an impact you must know what is coming next – so that you can ‘cue’ the reveal
appropriately. This is made easy for you with the ‘Presenter View’ (aka
Presenter Tools) facility that is built into Macs and is increasingly available
on PCs as well. For me, this is the most valuable tool to any presenter as,
rather than simply displaying the slide currently being projected, it also
displays the next slide, the entire run of slides (enabling you to jump
seamlessly to any point in the presentation) and other features such as Notes
and a clock.

Finally, in order to make the say it, then show principle work to best effect you need a slide
changer – and one with which you are completely comfortable, so preferably your
own. And be sure to practice – cueing is, after all, about timing!

Monday, 26 June 2017

As Theresa May lurched from one crisis to
another, I was asked last week by Helen Dunne, editor of CorpComms magazine,
for some advice to address the PM’s failure to empathise and communicate
effectively. Above all, the brief was ‘to make the Prime Minister seem more
human’.

The results from myself and other
commentators can be found here: https://corpcommsmagazine.co.uk/features-and-analysis/view/theresa-may-needs-a-new-media-strategy on the CorpComms web site. The general thrust of my
contribution, however, was based on advice I often give to clients in
Presentation Skills sessions: ‘Let a little light shine in on yourself and your
audience will warm to you. Then everything you say will sound more convincing,
because it is coming from someone they feel they know and can trust’. This, it
has to be said, needs to be rather more ‘real’ and spontaneous than a carefully
stage-managed display of leather trousers. Arguably the most effective thing
Mrs May did communications-wise over the Grenfell Tower disaster was reportedly
to have shed tears over the victims’ stories. But, cynical as it may sound, she
needed to be seen to be showing that
emotion, not simply beavering away behind closed doors in Downing Street. Just
look at how effective the Royals proved to be, simply by being seen to show up
in a timely manner. And how much ‘PR credit’ have they banked of late by
opening up on mental health issues?

So how do you apply the ‘Letting some light
shine in on yourself’ principle as a business presenter as opposed to a Prime
Minister or member of the Royal family? By way of example, I was working on a
rather dry presentation with a senior packaging executive. It was a bit of a
slog, so we took a break and over coffee he admitted that the new idea he was
preaching had actually been sparked by his children over breakfast. I asked him
if we could use that and he gradually warmed to the idea. What this meant was
that the audience were now seeing: family man; cute kids (from a picture he dug
out); a man willing to share credit on a day when the overall theme was
‘teamwork’; and a man prepared to think outside the box. As a result, his was
the presentation that everyone remembered and talked about afterwards.

It’s quite simple really, but be warned – it
needs a leap of confidence to get the process going. Note that my client’s key
theme only emerged during an informal chat over coffee. This is often the case
– most people are simply too coy to offer up aspects of their personal life in
a more formal setting and need to have it coaxed out of them. So be brave and
do it in consultation with others.

Monday, 12 June 2017

As I always say, Opening and Closing are the two most
important parts of any presentation. Aside from being the elements that
audiences are most likely to remember, your opening is key to engaging your
audience so that they listen, and your closing is where you spell out what you
want them to think and do as a result of your presentation.

So how do you create a real impact as you make that
all-important final ‘Call to Action’? You could
display a slide listing the key points of your presentation. And if you
restricted those points to three (exploiting the ‘Power of 3’) and kept each to
a one-liner, it would probably be quite effective.

But consider for a moment how much more effective your conclusion could be if you forgot the bullet
points and worked with a blank screen. At this point in almost any presentation
you are usually asking your audience to do or believe something. How much better
is that going to be if it comes directly from you – with full-on eye contact –
as you are seen to speak from the heart, rather than via a bunch of bullet
points? Blanking the screen is easy in PowerPoint – you simply press the B key.

Let me conclude by pointing to a way that many people
quickly kill any concluding impact they may have created, with a simple slip of
the keyboard.They display a slide showing
either: three short key points (quite good): ‘Thank You’ (not so good as this should
be spontaneous); or ‘Any Questions’? (not so good either as Q&A are much
better positioned earlier so that you can control your climax). Then they click
on further, crashing out of the slide show and revealing their desktop –
complete with latest emails, overdue software updates and their iTunes library,
probably with Abba’s greatest hits on prominent display.

Any impact they may have created is going to be very
short-lived and no amount of fumbling is going to make for an effective
recovery!How can you avoid crashing out
of slideshow mode? Make yourself an ‘end slide’, ideally to display after you
have delivered your Call to Action to a blank screen (using the B key). This
could simply be a copy of your intro slide; or it could be an abiding image
that underlines your Call to Action; or it could list your contact details. Having created the end slide, make a duplicate, so that you have two end slides and even if you press too
far no one gets to see your desktop.

Tuesday, 30 May 2017

There is always a debate when constructing business
presentations – to script or not to script?

There are many pros and cons on both sides. With scripting
you run the risk of the presenter just reading it out. Even if they memorise
the script it is likely to come over as stiff, too pre-prepared and lacking in spontaneity.

Equally, one of the biggest ways in which many people let
themselves down is that they don’t really know what they are going to say –
they meander and repeat themselves in a way that would be deemed normal for a
general conversation but unsuitable for a presentation where people have taken
the time and trouble to gather and listen. Furthermore, it will almost
certainly lack any real focus or impact, so may be a waste of (everybody’s)
time.

I therefore tend to avoid talk of actual ‘scripting’ – except
for the opening and closing, which I stress are the most important parts of any
presentation. As you open you need to get straight to your big agenda-setting
point while also engaging your audience. As you close you need to send your
audience away with a crystal-clear rendition of what you want them to remember
and do as a result of your presentation. Your opening and closing therefore need to be
both scripted and memorised – so that you are concise, word-perfect and can
give full-on eye contact at the most crucial moments. In between you can afford
to be a little more relaxed and informal.

Having long applied this principle to my Presentation Skills
coaching, I was delighted to find a supportive view in TED Talks, via a contribution from Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. I quote direct
from Head of TED Chris Anderson’s excellent book TED Talks – The official TED Guide to Public Speaking:

Dan Gilbert thinks it’s not either/or. First of all he
writes a script for his talks (being careful to use spoken English).But
then, when I deliver them I don’t stick to the script I wrote. So why do I
write them? Because writing a story is how you find out where the holes are! A
great talk is both scripted AND improvisational. It is precisely like a great
jazz performance: First, the opening and closing are always completely
scripted; second, the general structure is fully determined before the first
horn blows; but third, what makes jazz interesting and captivating is that in
the middle there is always some point (or several points) in which the player
can go off script and spontaneously create something that captures the mood of that
particular audience in that particular room at that particular moment in time. The
player can take a few moments to do this, but he must always know when to come
home, and he must always know where home is. A totally improvisational talk is
like free jazz: an utter abomination almost every time it happens. A totally
scripted talk is like a classical music concert: intricate, deep, and
flawlessly executed, but often predictable enough to put the audience to sleep
because they know from the start that there will be no surprises.

To me, that sums up the scenario perfectly, with key take
outs being:

1.A
great talk is both scripted AND improvisational.

2.The
opening and closing are always completely scripted.

3.He
must always know when to come home, and he must always know where home is.

I do, however, love the references to free jazz and classical
concerts.

Tuesday, 16 May 2017

We’ve all heard it so many times: “Only 7% of the meaning of
what you say is in the words; 55% comes through body language, and vocal tone
and modulation account for the remaining 38%”. And the formula has been
perpetuated for more than 40 years through word of mouth, unscrupulous trainers
and, of course, the internet.

Stop and think about it for a moment. If the ‘93% myth’ were
true, Shakespeare would surely have had Mark Anthony calling on his Friends,
Romans and Countrymen to lend him their eyes
rather than their ears. The telephone would be a fairly useless tool. The radio
industry would be out of business and, would there be much point even in
reading?

So what gave rise to the 93% myth? It all goes back to the
1960s when Professor Albert Mehrabian, based at the University of California,
conducted research into body language and non-verbal communications. The focus
of his study was discovering how emotion was communicated. His tests would therefore
include people saying something like “that’s nice”, but in an angry tone of
voice or with threatening body language.

Professor Albert Mehrabian

The results can therefore be more fully and accurately summed
up as:

7% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in the
words that are spoken

38% of meaning pertaining to feelings and attitudes is
paralinguistic (the way words are said)

55% of meaning pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in
facial expression

It is that crucial phrase pertaining to feelings and attitudes that has gone missing in
action over the years. It’s frustrating for us Presentation Skills coaches that
the over-simplification has taken hold and it clearly gets to Mehrabian too
because his web site (www.kaaj.com/psych)
includes a bolded disclaimer as follows:

Please note that this (7/55/38%) and other equations regarding the
relative importance of verbal and non-verbal messages were derived from
experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (ie
like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings and
attitudes, these equations are not applicable.

There you have it – from the originator himself. Clearly
body language and vocal tone play a crucial part in effective communication,
but these are to enhance the words that must – after audience focus - remain at
the top of the communication hierarchy.